Back to: The Twelve Days of Christmas Carols
In 1847, the official Placide Cappeau de Roquemaure was the commissionaire of wines in a small French town. Known more for his poetry than his church attendance, it probably shocked Placide when his parish priest asked the commissionaire to pen a poem for Christmas mass. He wasn’t the best church goer. Apparently, the church organ had recently been renovated. To celebrate the event, the parish priest persuaded the poet a native of the town, to write a Christmas poem.
In a coach traveling to Paris Cappeau began his task. Using the gospel of Luke as his guide, Cappeau imagined witnessing the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem. Thoughts of being present on the blessed night inspired him. By the time the commissionaire arrived in Paris, the poem “Cantique de Noel” had been completed. He decided it was only partially complete and it needed music to accompany
Not musically inclined himself, the poet turned to one of his friends, Adolphe Charles Adams, for help. Adolphe, born in 1803, was five years older than Cappeau. The son of a well-known classical musician, Adolphe had studied at the Paris Conservatoire. By 1829 he had produced his first one-act opera, Pierre et Catherine. He followed this success with Richard en Palestine. His talent and fame brought requests to write works for orchestras and ballets all around the world.
A man of Jewish ancestry, these words represented a holiday he didn’t celebrate and a man he did not view as the Son of God. Nevertheless, moved by more than friendship, Adams went to work, attempting to create music to Cappeau’s work. Adams’s finished work pleased both poet and priest. It was performed just three weeks later at a midnight mass on Christmas Eve.
Initially, “Cantique de Noel” was wholeheartedly accepted by the church in France and the song quickly found its way into various Catholic Christmas services. But when Placide Cappeau walked away from the church and became a part of the socialist movement, and church leaders discovered that Adolphe Adams was a Jew, the song—which had quickly grown to be one of the most beloved Christmas songs in France—was suddenly and uniformly denounced by the church.
The heads of the French Catholic church of the time deemed “Cantique de Noel” as unfit for church services because of its lack of musical taste and “total absence of the spirit of religion.” Yet even as the church tried to bury the Christmas song, the French people continued to sing it, and a decade later a reclusive American writer brought it to a whole new audience halfway around the world.
Born May 13, 1813, in Boston, John Sullivan Dwight was a graduate of Harvard College and Divinity school. He became a Unitarian minister in Northampton, Massachusetts, but for inexplicable reasons grew physically ill each time he had to address his congregation. These panic attacks magnified to such an extent that Dwight often locked himself in his home, scared to venture out in public. It soon became obvious he would be unable to continue in the ministry.
Dwight sought other ways to use his talents. An accomplished writer, he used his skills to found Dwight’s Journal of Music Although he couldn’t face crowds of people, music lovers in the Northeast were inspired by his confident writing. As he looked for new material to review, Dwight read “Cantique de Noel” in French. The former minister quickly fell in love with the carol’s haunting lyrics.
An ardent abolitionist, Dwight strongly identified with the lines, “Truly he taught us to love one another; His law is love and His gospel is peace. Chains shall he break, for the slave is our brother; and in his name, all oppression shall cease!” The text supported Dwight’s own view of slavery in the South. The writer believed that Christ came to free all men, and in this song, all men would be confronted with the fact.
Keeping the original meaning intact, Dwight translated the lyrics into a hauntingly beautiful English text. Published in his magazine and in several songbooks of the period, “O Holy Night” quickly found favor in America, especially in the North during the Civil War.
Legend has it that on Christmas Eve 1871, in the midst of fierce fighting between the armies of Germany and France during the Franco-Prussian War, a French soldier suddenly jumped out of his muddy trench. Both sides stared at the seemingly crazed man. Boldly standing with no weapon in his hands or at his side, he lifted his eyes to the heavens and sang, “Minuit, chrétiens, C’est l’heure solennelle Où l’Homme Dieu descendit jusqu’à nous,” the beginning of “Cantique de Noel.” He was answered by a German soldier with the beginning of Martin Luther’s robust hymn, “From Heaven Above to Earth I Come.”
The story goes that the fighting stopped for the next twenty-four hours while the men on both sides observed a temporary peace in honor of Christmas day. Perhaps this story had a part in the French church once again embracing “Cantique de Noel” as being worthy of inclusion in holiday services.
Adams had been dead for many years and Cappeau and Dwight were old men when on Christmas Eve 1906, Reginald Fessenden—a thirty-three-year-old university professor in Pittsburgh and former chief chemist for Thomas Edison—did something original. Using a new type of generator, Fessenden spoke into a microphone, and, for the first time in history, a man’s voice was broadcast over the airwaves and he read Luke’s Christmas story. Radio operators and wireless owners hear him
Shocked radio operators on ships and astonished wireless owners at newspapers were shocked to what they heard. After finishing his recitation of the birth of Christ, Fessenden picked up his violin and played “O Holy Night,” the first song ever sent through the air via radio waves. When the carol ended, so did the broadcast—but not before music had found a new medium that would take it around the world.